![]() ![]() In the “replace” box put only a das (hyphen) and nothing else. Since you can’t see spaces, you can highlight the text in the box to verify something is there (as I have done in this example). In the “find” box be sure you put in a single space. At this point we’ll just “replace text”, but you can experiment with other workflow actions as well. As you can see, there are several things you can do to filenames using this same “action”. Select “replace text” in the first drop down. This is where you want to get things right. In the first drop down, select “replace text”. In this case, we are making a simple workflow with one step, so you probably don’t need to copy first. ![]() Many of these possible actions you can choose from alter the file in some way, so Apple is reminding you that, depending on what you want to accomplish, you may want to add the “copy” action as well. Optional – You will be prompted to add a “copy finder items action”. Dragging this action to the right side will give you a prompt…which is the next step. We won’t go into those in this post, but Automator can be used to do many, many things. ![]() Notice that there are plenty of “Actions” you can choose from. The right pane is where you build your workflow (If you are confused, it’s the one that says “Drag actions or files here to build your workflow.”). ![]() Click on “files and folders” and then drag “rename finder items” to the pane on the right. In our case, once it is built, we will locate the files we need to alter and simply drag and drop them on the Application. An application is essentially a file that does whatever you build it to do. I recommend using “application” and saving it to your desktop (explained later). There are other options here that I won’t go into (you can research those on your own). Here is a step-by-step tutorial on how to build your own Automator workflow for changing spaces to hyphens in filenames. The rest happens automagically!įortunately, you don’t have to be a programmer to use Automator. In my case, I have it set up to allow me to find the files in Finder and drag them to a special icon on my desktop. (I am sure there is a relatively simple way to do it on Windows, but I am not aware of a built-in utility to do so.)Īll modern Mac’s (MacBooks, MacBook Pros, iMacs, Mac Pros, etc.) have a built in application called Automator that will allow you to build a simple tool to replace spaces in file names and replace them with whatever character you choose. The good news is that replacing spaces with hyphens can be easy to do, even in batches, if you have an Apple MacIntosh computer. Replace spaces with hyphens in bulk on a Mac with Automator. It takes multiple clicks and is highly inefficient. Then you can manually delete and replace the spaces with hyphens.īut it is a tedious process, especially if you have multiple filenames to edit. The manual method is is to open your file browser (Finder on Mac, File Explorer on Windows), find the file you need to change, and then right click and select “rename”. How to replace spaces with hyphens in filenames. But in most cases people use these terms interchangeably. There is actually a separate character that is a “dash” that is longer than the hyphen. To be clear, the hyphen (sometimes called dash) is the little line on the top right of the US English keyboard ( – ) that is also used as the minus sign. So, using a hyphen is preferred over spaces, and even over just mashing filenames into one long word (e.g., image-name-without-spaces.jpg is better than imagenamewithoutspaces.jpg for both humans and algorithms). The hyphen is preferred by most search engines as it helps their algorithms determine the relevance of a file for search purposes. I prefer to use a hyphen, and if you look around you’ll notice the best practice is to use hyphens. Most people chose to use either a hyphen ( – ) or and underscore ( _ ) instead of a space. What character should I use instead of a space? But if you work in the web world, even if just a personal blog, take the time to remove the spaces. Any file uploaded and linked will have this issue if it has spaces. gif, etc.) as well as all document formats (.doc. The same is true for all image file formats (.png. So an image file named “image name with spaces.jpg” becomes “image%20name%20with%20spaces.jpg” when uploaded to a website. You can do it, but every space gets replaced with “%20” in the file’s URL. So how can you replace spaces with hyphens easily? If you work with the web at all, you probably know that having spaces in a filename online is not a good idea. ![]()
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